November 19, 2022
"U.S. News & World Report will continue to rank all fully accredited law schools, regardless of whether schools agree to submit their data...."
"A few law schools recently announced that they will no longer participate in the data collection process.... However, U.S. News has a responsibility to prospective students to provide comparative information that allows them to assess these institutions.... We will continue to pursue our journalistic mission...."
Says U.S. News, quoted at Taxprof.
"... the theory that depolarizing opinion on electric cars by making Musk a right-wing culture war hero helps Tesla?"
doesn't this cut against the theory that depolarizing opinion on electric cars by making Musk a right-wing culture war hero helps Tesla?
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) November 19, 2022
"Sam literally said to me, ‘The only people I think I’d wear long pants for are Congress.'"
Said Andy Croghan — a colleague of Sam Bankman-Fried's — quoted in a May 2022 NYT article, "A Crypto Emperor’s Vision: No Pants, His Rules/Sam Bankman-Fried is a studiously disheveled billionaire who made a fortune overseeing trades that are too risky for the U.S. market. Now he wants Washington to follow his lead" (NYT).
Croghan was trying to get SBF to look more conventionally presentable. He says he said, "Sam, you’ve got to cut your hair, dude — it looks ridiculous." SBF retorted: "I honestly think it’s negative EV for me to cut my hair. I think it’s important for people to think I look crazy."
When SBF did testify before Congress, he wore long pants and was more subtly weird by doing his shoe laces like this:
"Qatar’s vision for the World Cup did not just require the building of seven stadiums and the refurbishment of an eighth."
"The country also needed an entire network of roads and rails to transport fans between the arenas and dozens upon dozens of hotels to house them — nothing less than an entirely redrawn country, rising from the sand in a $220 billion nation-building project. To achieve it, Qatar recruited hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from some of the poorest corners of the planet, swelling the country’s population — which grew by 13.2 percent in the last year alone — and drawing intense focus on the laborers’ treatment, their rights and their living conditions. How many have died over the last decade or more is not known, and may never be. Many thousands more have returned home sick or injured or deprived of the pay they were promised...."
"A new wave of migrant workers has arrived, meanwhile, to staff the hotels, man the stadiums and serve the food.... Qatar shocked FIFA and fans alike on Friday by deciding, only days before the tournament’s opening match, to go back on its promise to allow the sale of beer at its eight World Cup stadiums..... The about-face raised new questions about whether everyone — particularly LGBTQ+ fans — will face the kind of welcome that Qatar’s organizing committee and FIFA have consistently guaranteed. This month, Khalid Salman, a former Qatari national team player now deployed as an ambassador for the World Cup, did not seem to have heard the organizers’ messaging. 'Homosexuality is haram here,' he told a German documentary, using an Arabic word that roughly translates as forbidden. 'It is haram because it is damage in the mind.'"
ADDED: Is $220 billion really that much? It's just 5 Twitters.
AND: Imagine forbidding everything that is "damage in the mind"? What would escape forbidding?
I wonder: Rewrite that headline.
If you puzzle: A command is not a wondering, you see my problem — one of my problems — with the headline "Why hasn't Sam Bankman-Fried already been forced back to the US for FTX fiasco, critics wonder: 'Lock him up'/SBF's father, Joseph Bankman, notably helped Sen. Elizabeth Warren draft tax legislation." (Fox News).
1. Whether you're a "critic" or not, you can't "wonder" "Lock him up." You might wonder why he's not locked up. But you can't wonder an imperative.
2. I guess you could ignore the colon — which indicates that what the critics wonder is "Lock him up." Then you could see the critics as wondering why SBF hasn't been "forced back to the US." That is something that can be wondered. A question mark might help.
3. I find it hard to believe anyone is wondering that. There are no charges against SBF — not yet. I found that article because I was googling to see if SBF was actively fleeing from legal consequences. Isn't that what most of us would expect him to do — what we would do under the circumstances?
4. And that subheadline! What's the point of that if not to insinuate that SBF has political connections that are the reason he's not already extradited and locked up? It's such a weak insinuation. SBF's father is eminent enough to have some connection to drafting a tax bill, and — if you go to the link in the article — you'll see it was just about simplifying tax filing.
5. If you go on to read the article, you'll see it's not really about what "critics," plural, are saying. It's just about what Judge Jeanine Pirro said on Fox News, on "The Five." And Jesse Watters "agreed."
6. Here's something to wonder: Why is Fox News so trashy?
"I would hate to give up on my dream of becoming a family lawyer, just due to not being able to successfully handle this test."
Wrote Fariha Amin, "a full-time worker and mother to a 6-year-old son," quoted in "Law School Accrediting Panel Votes to Make LSAT Optional/Legal-education community has been divided over testing requirement and its impact on diversity in admissions" (Wall Street Journal).
And here's a quote from John White, chair of LSAC’s board of trustees: "This proposal will be highly disruptive. The change won’t be worth it, and we won’t get the diversity we are looking for."
I wonder how he knows... how he thinks he knows.
There's also council member Craig Boise, dean of Syracuse University College of Law: "I find the argument that the test is necessary to save diversity in legal education is bizarre."
How is it "bizarre"? It's something I've heard for more than 30 years. (I was a lawprof for more than 30 years, and I often served on the admissions committee. I've read many real applications and seen the relationship between LSAT scores and other aspects of an applicant's qualifications.)
The LSAT produces a hard number, and it feels secure to rely on such things. But you can rely too much, and the U.S. News ranking has for decades rewarded schools that rely heavily on this number. The question is who will contribute to the class in law school and go on to do good work, not who did best on one structured, high-pressure test.
November 18, 2022
At the Friday Night Café...
... it's cold and windy here in Madison, and you can talk about whatever you want.
"The old Republican Party is dead. It has been wasting away for years now, and this month’s midterm results are the finishing blow...."
Writes Josh Hawley in an opinion piece in The Washington Post.
Republicans will only secure the generational victories they crave when they come to terms with this reality: They must persuade a critical mass of working class voters that the GOP truly represents their interests and protects their culture....
Work, family and culture are the touchstones of meaning for working people across the country.... A reborn Republican Party must look very different. It must offer good jobs and good lives.... And it must place working Americans at its heart and take them as they are, rather than treating them as resources to be exploited or engineered away....
From the comments over there: "He doesn't give a rat's behind about working people"/"He's too deeply masculine, and real men don't give a damn"/"No new thinking here. Platitudes about working families but no policies. Protecting our culture - how, exactly, and from what?"/"The GOP is dead because you and your fellow moronic cretins under its tent killed it, you abject loser and coward."
"Trump is said to have told some allies that the idea of a special counsel infuriated him, given his experience with the length of the Mueller investigation."
"He believes it could hang over him for months. Nonetheless, it might make a prosecution more distant."
ADDED: Let me connect that with this WaPo piece from 4 days ago:
"... Professor Dan Epps... hypothesized that Yale plans to make major changes to admissions in the wake of the expected Supreme Court affirmative action rulings, 'and they are doing this proactively'..."
"'... rather than dealing with any rankings implications later.' [Some] students [agreed and] speculated... that not having to worry about LSAT and GPA data dragging down its U.S. News rank will allow YLS to either (a) continue to use racial preferences in admissions or (b) water down its academic credentials. Furthermore... some sources suggested that Dean Gerken withdrew from the rankings because she feared that YLS was about to lose the #1 spot it has held for more than three decades—and she didn’t want that to happen on her watch.... One professor told me that... there was no sense within the faculty that YLS’s #1 ranking was at imminent risk. Instead... 'This is clearly part of a larger and deeper commitment on her part toward leadership in the law school industry when it comes to fairness, welfare, and equity.'"
From "Yale And Harvard Law To U.S. News: Drop Dead/Two leading law schools have withdrawn from the influential law school rankings; will others follow?" by David Lat (Substack).
I remember when U.S. News first started this ranking. It was 1987, and I was 3 years into teaching at the University of Wisconsin Law School. From day one, the professors at my school were hostile to the rankings. We had our values, and how dare U.S. News attempt to influence our choices.
Here's how the rankings looked in 1987. We were #20 at that point — the point when the game began. A decade later we were struggling for position in the 30s and we currently stand at #43.
Is this an occasion for poetry? I don't like that impunity/immunity rhyme. It feels callous, and it doesn't even make sense.
If he has impunity, he doesn't need immunity. The headline writer seems to have lost his head. But why? It's no occasion for rhapsodizing!
Here's the article. The immunity is from a civil suit brought by the fiancee of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
"Congress has routinely ducked responsibility for addressing border dysfunction, in large part the result of an asylum system that lawmakers have left broken."
"Unless Congress acts, the nation will face the consequences of lawmakers’ dithering. On Tuesday, a federal judge in D.C. ruled that the government can no longer use an order, invoked at the pandemic’s outset, whose public health benefits have long since evaporated.... The progressive collapse of this country’s asylum system over many years... is the main cause of today’s accelerating disarray at the border.... [But] the president and his border policies have contributed to the problem. On taking office, President Biden set about dismantling the Trump administration’s restrictions.... In response to Judge Sullivan’s ruling, the Biden administration... has prepared to rush resources to the border, including thousands of beds to hold detainees in tent facilities, and is planning for quicker deportations as a deterrent. Ultimately, though, the fix, and the failure, lie with Congress."
From the Washingon Post Editorial Board: "Only Congress can solve the coming border surge."
"[T]he crypto ecosystem has basically evolved into exactly what it was supposed to replace: a system of financial intermediaries whose ability to operate depends..."
"... on their perceived trustworthiness. In which case, what is the point? Why should an industry that at best has simply reinvented conventional banking have any fundamental value? Furthermore, trust in conventional financial institutions rests in part on validation by Uncle Sam: The government supervises banks, regulates the risks they can take and guarantees many deposits, while crypto operates largely without oversight. So investors must rely on the honesty and competence of entrepreneurs; when they offer exceptionally good deals, investors must believe not just in their competence but in their genius. How has that been working out?"
Writes Paul Krugman in "Is This the End Game for Crypto?" (NYT).
Comments need to address the substance of the argument.
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